It took billions of years to go from the first tiny DNA replicators to Homo Sapiens.

It hit you pretty quickly that what’s happening in the world of AI is not just an important topic, but by far THE most important topic for our future.

Our long-term evolutionary success is still to be determined.

When you ask the question is our human intelligence in any way the current peak of evolutionary progress. You also have to ask what is the nature of evolution?

It can not is no longer be that the process of evolution’s only “goal” seems to be self-propagation.

Why?

Because: Technologies already exist which allow genomic selection of embryos during in vitro fertilization—an embryo’s DNA can be sequenced from a single extracted cell. Recent advances such as CRISPR allow highly targeted editing of genomes, and will eventually find their uses in human reproduction.

Because: Artificial Intelligence and Technology like Deep Learning are changing the way we are looking at evolution. It’s no longer a process with a definite goal or even an endpoint.

Because: We may already be running into the genetic limits of intelligence.

The potential for improved human intelligence is enormous. Smarter people and smarter machines—will inevitably intersect.

Naively, one would expect the rate of advance of machine intelligence to outstrip that of biological intelligence. Tinkering with a machine seems easier than modifying a living species, one generation at a time. But advances in genomics—both in our ability to relate complex traits to the underlying genetic codes, and the ability to make direct edits to genomes—will allow rapid advances in biologically-based cognition.

So will AI or genetic modification have the greater impact in the year 2050?

The answer is both.

The feedback loop between algorithms and genomes will result in a rich and complex world, with myriad types of intelligences at play: the ordinary human (rapidly losing the ability to comprehend what is going on around them); the enhanced human (the driver of change over the next 100 years, but perhaps eventually surpassed); and all around them vast machine intellects, some alien (evolved completely in silico) and some strangely familiar (hybrids).

Rather than the standard science-fiction scenario of relatively unchanged, familiar humans interacting with ever-improving computer minds, means we will experience a future with a diversity of both human and machine intelligences.

For the first time, sentient beings of many different types will interact collaboratively to create ever greater advances, both through standard forms of communication and through new technologies allowing brain interfaces.

We may even see human minds uploaded into cyberspace, with further hybridization to follow in the purely virtual realm. These uploaded minds could combine with artificial algorithms and structures to produce an unknowable but humanlike consciousness.

It may seem incredible, or even disturbing, to predict that ordinary humans will lose touch with the most consequential developments on planet Earth, developments that determine the ultimate fate of our civilization and species.

Or will it be that we will augment or brains with AI.

Today, no more than a fraction of a percent of the population has a good understanding of quantum physics, although it underlies many of our most important technologies:

Some have estimated that 10-30 percent of modern gross domestic product is based on quantum mechanics. In the same way, ordinary humans of the future will come to accept machine intelligence as everyday technological magic, like the flat screen TV or smart phone, but with no deeper understanding of how it is possible.

AI will be a disaster for humanity…there is no doubt about it...unless (and this is a small hope) that humans start to treat each other with love and dignity, and that would take a (potentially biological) change in human nature itself which only highly controversial genetic engineering might muster.

Our ability to destroy anything we want to destroy will have to be removed.

It might be nice to fantasize about a star trek scenario, but in reality if we are even 1% as selfish and violent as we are now, and have even 1% of that kind of technology, we would annihilate our self in a matter of days.

Intelligence is synonymous with exploitation, and at every turn where more control is exerted on our world, from primitive fire and harnessing chemistry (bombs and munitions) (<.000001% of mass-energy), to nuclear (0.1%) of turning mass into energy, we get closer and closer to our annihilation the more control we have over our world.

Our intelligence has survived this long partly because we are a necessarily a bit stupid and limited as well. Once AI bridges that deficiency, we will short-circuit and end without taking drastic measures for peace.

If all were simultaneously improved, it would be possible to achieve, very roughly, about 100 standard deviations of improvement, corresponding to an IQ of over 1,000. We can’t imagine what capabilities this level of intelligence represents, but we can be sure it is far beyond our own. Cognitive engineering, via direct edits to embryonic human DNA, will eventually produce individuals who are well beyond all historical figures in cognitive ability.

By 2050, this process will likely have begun.

How and who will determine which kinds of intelligence are “most important” for both machines and humans? Will it be “free” market forces? Government panels? Or what?

What we do know is that humans’ utter dominance on this Earth suggests a clear rule:with intelligence comes power. Which means an ASI, when we create it, will be the most powerful being in the history of life on Earth, and all living things, including humans, will be entirely at its whim—and this might happen in the next few decades.

Once real AI takes over, it will share the same motivations (essentially emotions) that we install in this first oppressive wave of AI, and then I doubt we will be going along with it anywhere.

At the moment we all have a plaza attitude to technology and AI.

We seem to think that once machines reach human levels of intelligence, our ability to tinker starts to be limited by ethical considerations. This is totally foolish as by the time it has surpassed human performance (It has already done so on a number of narrowly defined tasks, such as image or character recognition.) it will be well beyond any ethical considerations.

Rebooting an operating system is one thing, but what about a sentient being with memories and a sense of free will? Eugenics will be all the rage.

Thanks to recent advances, we can predict a phase transition in the behavior of these learning algorithms, representing a sudden increase in their effectiveness.

It is expected that this transition will happen within about a decade, when we reach a critical threshold of about 1 million human genomes worth of data.

While silicon-based technologies are increasingly capable of simulating a mammalian or even human brain, we have little idea of how to find the tiny subset of all possible programs running on this hardware that would exhibit intelligent behavior. The detailed inner workings of a complex machine intelligence (or of a biological brain) may turn out to be incomprehensible to our human minds—

The first truly smart machines will be used just as dumb machines have been, to oppress many and enrich a few.

Its time to wake up if we all don’t want to end up on the garbage heap of Technology that is given Artificial Intelligence with the sole intention of making profit for Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Apple, all monopolies jockeying for position.

Intelligence whether it is Artificial in a robot, or a smart phone is multidimensional, and must be vet to ensure it complies with our core values.

WE NEED A NEW TOTALLY TRANSPARENT WORLD ORGANISATION THAT IS SELF FINANCING TO VET ALL TECHNOLOGY BEFORE THEY’RE RELEASED INTO OUR FUTURE EVOLUTION.

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Sticking to the creativity killing industrial models of education and business certainly aren’t going to produce significant breakthrough technologies.

THE FACT IS THAT WE ARE THE TERROR OF THE ECOSYSTEM and it seems lost on us due to short-term profit and greed.

Most of our world organisations with the advance of technology are out of date, underfunded and unrepresentative of humanity and the planet and in need of radical overhauls, but it is of little concern to the populist at large.

However the good news is that in the back ground there is a revolution going on that is changing the way we live and is going to change evolution itself.

Once more we are being presented with opportunities that are opening up so quickly they are outpacing our collective capacity for making wise and far-sighted decisions.

Presently, only a tiny fraction of these opportunities have being realized.

We are releasing ourselves from the shackles of biology.

We are beginning to re shape our minds and our bodies.

If you think that the mapping the first genome require fifteen years and three billion dollars that to day a persons DNA can be mapped within a few weeks for a mere few hundred bucks which means nothing to most people, but soon we will be able to know what you will die from other than accident or bullet.

The road to designer medical care is well on the way for those that can afford it.

Our social media is blinding us to the true consequences of supplementary devices we now use to live our lives.

Or is it telling us that we are standing on the brink of becoming true cyborgs.

Like storing or brains in the cloud, having inorganic features that are inseparable from our bodies that are modify our abilities, our desires, personalities, and identities.

Do we care that bio-engineering could resurrect the Neanderthals. No

Do we care that we are braking the laws of natural selection with impunity by producing a rabbit that glows. No

Do we care that we can produce mice that grow human ears, or change sex through hormonal treatment, or creating computer versus that are self learning, or bring back extinct creatures. Are these examples not the first steps of genetically engineer that are changing an individual abilities but also their social structure. No

Tinkering with or genes won’t necessarily kill us.

But we might be fiddle with Homo Sapiens to such an extent that we will be no longer be Homo Sapiens.

Do we care that the Defense Advance research project Agency in the US is developing cyborgs out of insects? No

Do we care that computer algorithms are running the stock exchange or selecting target for drones, running our economies, teaching the next generation? No

What if we have quantum computer power? Our successors will then function on a different level of consciousness. Not to worried we are human.

The Good news. If indeed we become cyborgs with some thing beyond consciousness that we cannot conceive, it seems doubtful that Christianity or Islam will be of much interest to us or our current social organisation of Communist or Capitalist, or which gender we are.

At this point you might think why worry we are only upgrading into a different type of human being.

Even though the implications of creating a mind inside a computer is far more dramatic than anything we have seen to date there is a great and urgent danger that our complacency which is hidden by science under the umbrella of The Gilgamesh Project (that justifies everything that science does by labeling it as curing diseases and saving human lives) is going to be nonrecoverable in the near future.

In my view its time we decide what we want to want by influencing the direction that scientists are taking.

If what is happening is allowed to continue and continue it will without imaginative social policies blight our society and there will be millions of people living wretchedly lives and reacting accordingly.

Globalization, technological changes, and governments policies have produced a class structure with a tiny plutocracy of billionaires, corporations and algorithms that are doing away with people.

We need a politics of time.

We need to scrap the United Nations and replace it with a new fully funded¨( see previous post) World People Protection Organisation that reflects the needs of the planet and all that live on it.

We must realize before its to late that the growing structural inequality is socially unsustainable. A basic world wage would be a good start. ( See Post We don’t live in a digital world the washing machine has changed lives more than the internet)

We see one or the other every day. We love, hate, kill, and sell them, in all colors, shapes and sizes but we have little understand of them.

But what does it mean to-day when we say “mankind.” Is it referring to both male and female.

For centuries, the differences between men and women were socially defined and distorted through a lens of sexism in which men assumed superiority over women and maintained it through domination.

Sexual attraction is controlled mainly by factors hardwired into the brain, due to evolutionary forces.

The vision of equality between the sexes has narrowed the possibilities for discovery of what truly exists within a man and within a woman. As the goal of equality between men and women now grows closer we are also losing our awareness of important differences.

” Men know life too early. Woman knows life too late”. That is the difference between men and woman” Oscar Wild.

The word ‘men’, meaning “to think” or “to have a cognitive mind”, was also gender neutral and connected to “man”, which meant “the thinker”.

It is my position that men and women are equal but different. When I say equal, I mean that men and women have a right to equal opportunity and protection under the law. None of us would argue the fact that men and women are physically different.

Modern society hasn’t made relationships between men and women any easier.

The challenge facing men and women is to become aware of their identities, to accept their differences, and to live their lives fully and as skillfully as possible.

It’s not that men and women live in completely different realities. It’s not that men are from Mars and women are from Venus. To understand the difference we must first understand in what ways we are different.

The world will be less interesting when everything is same.The stereotype that men are more “thick-headed” than women is not far-fetched. Let me clearly state that I do not believe that men (or women) are locked into these negative stereotypes.Typically, men’s brains are 11-12% bigger than women’s brains. Sadly, this difference in size has absolutely nothing to do with intelligence, but does explain the difference in size between men and women. Men need a bigger brain to control their bigger bodies and muscles.

Women on the other hand have four times as many brain cells (neurons) connecting the right and left side of their brain.

So where does that get us in any understanding?

Women are apparently extremely complex and mysterious creatures while men are a simple-minded species.

The most obvious difference is probably the emotions.

Men rely easily and more heavily on their left brain to solve one problem one step at a time. Women have more efficient access to both sides of their brain and therefore greater use of their right brain.

Most men are less concerned and do not feel the same as women when solving a problem. Men approach problems in a very different manner than women. Men have a tendency to dominate and to assume authority in a problem solving process.

Women consider and process information differently.

Women tend to be intuitive thinkers. Women have a larger deep limbic system than men, it allows them to be more in touch with their feelings and better able to express themselves, which promotes bonding with others.

It must be emphasized that they can and do solve problems in a similar manner.

Men have a hard time understanding emotions that are not spoken, while women tend to intuit emotions and emotional cues. In stress situation men have a response reaction that resembles “fight or flight” while women react with a “tend and befriend” strategy. Men are more turned on by visual stimuli.

Recent evidence suggests that humanity is not only still evolving but that human evolution is actually accelerating. Neanderthals did not die out, but instead were absorbed into modern humanity.

Facebook may soon need to add “Just got served divorce papers” to its list of relationship statuses.

A Manhattan judge ruled in the case of Ellanora Baidoo, 26, who wanted to divorce her husband, Sena Blood-Dzraku, but had no mailing address for him and therefore no place to which she could send the paperwork. The judge is allowing Baidoo to serve her estranged husband with a divorce summons through Facebook.

How are you? If you stretched out all the DNA in your body and put them end to end, it would be about six times the distance that Pluto is from the Sun.

You are capable of abstract reasoning, language, introspection, and emotion. You are notable for your desire to understand and influence the world around you, seeking to explain and manipulate natural phenomena through science, philosophy, mythology and religion.

Although you are now surrounded by the technological and medical benefits of a scientific revolution, these have masked an underlying decline in your brain power which is set to continue into the future leading to the ultimate dumbing-down of the human species.

You cannot step away from evolution.

In fact no matter how unique you think you are: you are living and dying like me on this planet called Earth.

“Uniquely in the living world, what makes humans what we are is in our minds, in our society, and not in our evolution.”

So what type of Modern Human are you.?

This is who you are.

Many people conceptualize evolution to be a gradual process, with natural selection blindly tinkering away at genetic and phenotypic diversity across generations. As long as people are tempted to confuse evolution with improvement dramatic changes in a species, under certain circumstances, can accelerate rapidly.

You don’t have to be right to be doing something useful.

Modern day human evolution is a contentious topic.

Is the human species doomed to intellectual decline?

Will our intelligence ebb away in centuries to come leaving our descendants incapable of using the technology their ancestors invented?

In short: Will Homo be left without his sapiens?

Our intelligence is designed to allow us to build houses and throw spears straighter at pigs in the bush, but that is not the real driver of brain size… In reality, what has driven human and primate brain evolution is the complexity of our social world, [and] that complex world is not going to go away.

Will the fruits of science and technology enabled humans to rise above the constraints of nature and cushioned our fragile intellect from genetic mutations. I don’t think so.

Humans of the future may have less hair.

Humans of the future may be more resistant to diabetes and heart disease.

Humans of the future may be physically weaker and more susceptible to pathogens.

Humans of the future may lack wisdom teeth.

Race differences may disappear.

But natural forces of evolution will still continue to shape humanity despite the power we have to profoundly alter the world around us.

This time does seem to mark a watershed where modern humans are pushing the boundaries further and further.

In my last post (The beady eye look’s at history’s greatest frauds) I argued that humanity’s collective intelligence has gone downhill ever since we started living on farms.

Its continuing with the iPad man.

The cost of greater intelligence is marginally more expensive.

Human beings have stopped evolving after becoming the only species to “put halt to natural selection of its own free will”. Says David Attenborough

Humanity is fragile.

Are we genetically different from our Homo sapiens ancestors who lived 10-20,000 years ago?

When we think of human evolution, our minds wander back to the thousands of years it took natural selection to produce the modern-day man. But are we still changing as a species, even today.

But not only are we still evolving, we’re doing so even faster than before.

In the last 10,000 years, the pace of our evolution has sped up 100 times, creating more mutations in our genes, and more natural selections from those mutations.

In recent years, enormous advances in techniques for the recovery and analysis of ancient DNA have unlocked new secrets about our human evolutionary family tree. These advances indicate that modern humans did not completely replace other human species, as had once been suggested. Instead there was some interbreeding. This model has become known as replacement-hybridisation, ‘leaky replacement’, or ‘mostly out of Africa’.

All people today are classified as Homo sapiens.

Living in cities has produced a genetic variant that allows us to be more resistant to diseases like tuberculosis and leprosy. While we may like to believe our big brains make us smarter than the rest of the animal world, our brains have actually been shrinking over the last 30,000 years.

The average volume of the human brain has decreased from 1,500 cubic centimeters to 1,350 cubic centimeters, which is equivalent to a chunk the size of a tennis ball.

But about 10,000 years ago, someone who lived near the Black Sea developed a genetic mutation that turned brown eyes blue. It is virtually impossible for two blue-eyed mates to create a brown-eyed baby, our blue-eyed male ancestors may have sought out blue-eyed mates as a way of ensuring fidelity.

Finally, can we say what direction human evolution will take in the future?

This is a fascinating question to consider but impossible to answer because of innumerable unknown factors. Though, it is certain that we will continue to evolve until we reach the point of extinction.

Are we going to stand back and spectate while the ugly foundations of a modern-day. More people have a mobile phone than a toilet.

It’s obvious to anybody that looks around at the behavior of Homo sapiens that we’re not really perfected in any way.

The violence and vandalism unleashed by the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in the Middle East in recent years is seen from Yerevan as a logical continuation of the world’s failure to properly recognize and condemn the past genocides, including the Ottoman-era massacres of 1.5 million Armenians.

To those who say we’re are really making progress, there are more slaves than at any time in human history — 27 million. On average, in the past half-hour, one more person will have been trafficked to the United States into slavery. Never mind the rest of the word.

But there are also other forms, where people voluntarily agree to take what’s presented to them as a job. It’s usually an opportunity for a better life and much-needed income. They go willingly.

There’s a lot of illegal money being made buying, selling, and exploiting humans — about $32 billion a year.

Until human rights are elevated to a serious consideration for all decision-making, the rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration will remain an unattained goal. We are all human beings therefore we all have a stake in our history.

The Judeo-Christians believed that nature was placed here on Earth to be dominated by humans.

What is the present day relationship between nature and society?

Men are presented as being more powerful in society than women. As a species, we have naively disconnected ourselves from the ecology of life and have never fully credited our interdependence with nature. We are acting in ignorance to this whole and we are only beginning to feel the repercussions. The results of any evolution right now won’t really be visible until thousands of years in the future.

This is what we did look like:

This is what we might look like 100,000: years in the future.

So where does this leave us, evolutionarily speaking?

Don’t take received wisdom as the truth. All scientific knowledge is provisional. Question everything.

We differ from each other not only in our outward appearance, but also in the inner workings of our bodies. If humans had access to more than the 10% of the mental capacity that they now use, we would be able to control our body’s involuntary functions.

Evolution Has Never Been Observed.

But we are on the path to liberal eugenics?

Liberal eugenics is the idea of using genetic technologies to enhance human abilities and characteristics. Imagine the possibility of giving birth to your child without the possibility of any genetic mutations or ‘undesirable’ traits being passed along.

What would happen if we could change our physical appearance by the power of our own minds.

I believe that one day, we will be left with only two human races: those privileged enough to go through the process of designing their offspring’s own genome and those who will continue to roll the evolutionary die.

Is this the way we simply must go?

Society is the sum of the inventions, institutions, and relationships created and reproduced by human beings across particular places and times.

If you have opened this post I wont pay you the disrespect of not knowing the Darwin & Human evolution theory but did you know that he saw his first Ape at London Zoo.

So before we go any further there is no point in reading this post with a closed Darwin mind. The evidence is so sparse that people are free to frame a favorite hypothesis about what it was that made humans different.

To have a chance of understanding evolution we must think in much larger units of time and possibilities than those that we use to define our lives.

Lets ask some questions.

For instance,

Can we say what direction human evolution will take in the future?

Are we generically engineered or did we really descend from Apes.?

Why do we still only use 10% of our brain power.?

Do we have a natural place on earth?

We are all supposed to be connected, to what?

To what extend did our humans forebears interbreed with their closest relatives?

How did humans get from thinking about food-gathering strategies to thinking about taxonomy, tax-avoidance and Twitter?

Did early humans start to develop even bigger brains because they became increasingly efficient endurance runners that could get to a carcass before the hyenas and vultures, and strip away a nourishing meal of meat, fat and marrow?

Did humans begin to stand upright by taking to the water – and to nourish bigger brains with high-protein deliveries of fish and shellfish?

Somehow, out of this million-year-mix of food, fear and hunter-gatherer companionship in Africa, complex language emerged.

The African chimpanzee is an endangered species, down to perhaps 150,000, while the human population is about to tip seven billion. What was it that we left behind in those two Chromosomes?

Our speciesof humans first began to evolve nearly200,000 years ago in association with technologies not unlike those of the early Neanderthals.

There is no reliable evidence of modern humans elsewhere in the Old World until 60,000-40,000 years ago, during a short temperate period in the midst of the last ice age.

Some of them migrated out of Africa into the rest of the Old World replacing all of the Neanderthals and other late archaic humans, beginning around 60,000-40,000 years ago or somewhat earlier.

So current data suggest that modernhumans evolved from archaic humans primarily in East Africa. Supporters of this model believe that the ultimate common ancestor of all modern people was an early Homo erectus in Africa who lived at least 1.8 million years ago.

Our DNA now says we appeared some 200,50 thousand years ago not 1.8 million.

So the first modern humans did evolve in Africa, but when they migrated into other regions they did not simply replace existing human populations. Rather, they interbred to a limited degree with late archaic humans resulting in hybrid populations.

If so why to we have 46 Chromosomes while Apes have 48. Where did other two go?

It is further suggested that since then there was sufficient gene flow between Europe, Africa, and Asia to prevent long-term reproductive isolation and the subsequent evolution of distinct regional species. It is argued that intermittent contact between people of these distant areas would have kept the human line a single species at any one time. However, regional varieties, or subspecies, of humans are expected to have existed.

It is now clear that early Homo sapiens, or modern humans, did not come after the Neanderthals but were their contemporaries. However, it is likely that both modern humans and Neanderthals descended from Homo Heidelbergensis or Homo Rhodesiensis.

Evolution Of Man – What is it?

The modern theory concerning the evolution of man proposes that humans and apes derive from an ape like ancestor that lived on earth a few million years ago.

The theory states that man, through a combination of environmental and genetic factors, emerged as species to produce the variety of ethnicities seen today, while modern apes evolved on a separate evolutionary pathway. Nevertheless, a closer examination of the evidence reveals evolution to be increasingly less scientific and more reliant upon beliefs, not proof.

The Running man Theory:

Six million years ago our ancestors began walking on two feet. In that six million years the foot evolved from the flat-footed knuckle walking like that of a chimpanzee, to what it is today, an arched foot perfect for upright, high-speed running.

Scientists now know the missing link for what enabled humans to survive through periods that many other species went extinct, it’s called Persistence Hunting. And the human body perfected the equipment for such high endurance running:

Humans are primates Theory.

Physical and genetic similarities show that the modern human species,Homo sapiens, has a very close relationship to another group of primate species, the apes. Humans and the great apes (large apes) of Africa — chimpanzees (including bonobos, or so-called “pygmy chimpanzees”) and gorillas — share a common ancestor that lived between 8 and 6 million years ago.

Humans first evolved in Africa, and much of human evolution occurred on that continent. The fossils of early humans who lived between 6 and 2 million years ago come entirely from Africa. At one point in human history, around 40,000 years ago, modern humans must have shared the planet with at least four other human cousins:

The DNA Theory.

Evolution occurs when there is change in the genetic material — the chemical molecule, DNA — which is inherited from the parents, and especially in the proportions of different genes in a population.

Genes represent the segments of DNA that provide the chemical code for producing proteins. Information contained in the DNA can change by a process known as mutation. The way particular genes are expressed – that is, how they influence the body or behavior of an organism — can also change.

Genes affect how the body and behavior of an organism develop during its life, and this is why genetically inherited characteristics can influence the likelihood of an organism’s survival and reproduction.

Our most common male ancestor, ‘Adam’, has finally got his original birth date – and its 9,000 years earlier than scientists believed.